Vista - No audio device found

Well, I've spent days trying to get sound on vista and I'm still unsucessful.
Hopefully, someone can help. I'll summarize my situation.

1. Installed the final version of Vista Ultimate 32bit on a new harddrive
on my system. (nothing like a clean install). I still have my old HD in
there as a slave and by changing the boot drive in my BIOS I can easily
revert back to my XP just in case I had problems with vista.

2. My motherboard is an ASUS A7V8X-X with an Athlon 2600+ processor. The
motherboard has a built-in Realtek sound card.

3. Initially I had sound, but at some point it stopped. Unfortunately, I
didn't notice it until I had no way of knowing what stopped it. So I tried
installing the latest Realtek drivers and nothing would work so I decided to
go out an buy a new sound blaster card that had vista drivers. Since I'm not
heavily into "sound", I just purchase an inexpensive Audigy SE card.

4. I uninstalled the Realtek driver from the devicemanager rebooted and
changed my BIOS to disable the on board sound card.

5. When vista booted I ran the install for the vista beta drivers for the
Audigy SE. Still no sound.

6. Rebooted. Still no sound.

7. Changed the sound card to various PCI slots, rebooted, etc. Still no
sound.

8. Just to make sure, I booted to my Windows XP drive and installed the
drivers and the sound works well. A little skippy I must admit, but it works
none the less.

9. Another symptom is that my little speaker icon in the task tray has a
red x on it and if you select to open it, it says, "No audio device is
installed".

10. If you look at the card in the device manager it seems ok.

11. If you go to sounds in the control panel, the recording tab hangs the
control applet.

Does anyone have a clue what it going on or how I can figure what to do to
fix this. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Could it be some sort of registry corruption? Any ideas where I can look?
I'm an advance user so I'm not afraid to go looking in places behind the
scenes. I can't help but think that it's not necessarily a problem with the
sound driver, but maybe the installed codecs or something.

Thanks
Mark

"Demi" wrote:

> Well, I've spent days trying to get sound on vista and I'm still unsucessful.
> Hopefully, someone can help. I'll summarize my situation.
>
> 1. Installed the final version of Vista Ultimate 32bit on a new harddrive
> on my system. (nothing like a clean install). I still have my old HD in
> there as a slave and by changing the boot drive in my BIOS I can easily
> revert back to my XP just in case I had problems with vista.
>
> 2. My motherboard is an ASUS A7V8X-X with an Athlon 2600+ processor. The
> motherboard has a built-in Realtek sound card.
>
> 3. Initially I had sound, but at some point it stopped. Unfortunately, I
> didn't notice it until I had no way of knowing what stopped it. So I tried
> installing the latest Realtek drivers and nothing would work so I decided to
> go out an buy a new sound blaster card that had vista drivers. Since I'm not
> heavily into "sound", I just purchase an inexpensive Audigy SE card.
>
> 4. I uninstalled the Realtek driver from the devicemanager rebooted and
> changed my BIOS to disable the on board sound card.
>
> 5. When vista booted I ran the install for the vista beta drivers for the
> Audigy SE. Still no sound.
>
> 6. Rebooted. Still no sound.
>
> 7. Changed the sound card to various PCI slots, rebooted, etc. Still no
> sound.
>
> 8. Just to make sure, I booted to my Windows XP drive and installed the
> drivers and the sound works well. A little skippy I must admit, but it works
> none the less.
>
> 9. Another symptom is that my little speaker icon in the task tray has a
> red x on it and if you select to open it, it says, "No audio device is
> installed".
>
> 10. If you look at the card in the device manager it seems ok.
>
> 11. If you go to sounds in the control panel, the recording tab hangs the
> control applet.
>
> Does anyone have a clue what it going on or how I can figure what to do to
> fix this. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
>
> Could it be some sort of registry corruption? Any ideas where I can look?
> I'm an advance user so I'm not afraid to go looking in places behind the
> scenes. I can't help but think that it's not necessarily a problem with the
> sound driver, but maybe the installed codecs or something.
>
> Thanks
> Mark

I was having the same problem with my Sound Blaster card. From what I could
find, Vista seems to load minimum or no drivers if it doesn't find the sound
blaster drivers. Creative Labs hasn't made new Vista-specific drivers for a
lot of their cards yet. I solved the problem by running the drivers disk
that came with the sound card when the Found New Hardware appeard and Vista
asked for drivers for Multimedia Audio Controller. The entry I now have in
my device manager for sound, video and game controllers is Creative EMU10K1
Audio Processor (WMD) and sound appears to work fine so far. The game
controller doesn't appear to be supported, which might make using a joystick
a problem.

As a side note, trying to install the drivers from the disk while in the
Windows Vista environment didn't work. I kept getting the "no hardware
found" message. To solve this I (1) uninsatalled all in the sound, video and
game controllers, (2) shut down the computer, (3) removed the sound card and
moved it to a different PCI slot, (4) turned the computer back on and (5)
popped in the disk when Vista informed me "found new hardware" and asked for
the manufacturer's disk for the drivers for Multimedia Audio Controller.

I hope this helps.

I'll try the "remove drivers, shutdown, change pci slot, boot, install new
drivers" to see, but I did so someting similar to that.

SB does have new drivers, though they are beta. The seem to work for other
people, that's why I think it's vista and not actually the drivers. The
problem with the drivers is that they have a setup.exe, it's not just a
folder of files to point to. Maybe I'll tell vista to ignore it, then run
the setup.exe?

"Dan" wrote:

>
>
> "Demi" wrote:
>
> > Well, I've spent days trying to get sound on vista and I'm still unsucessful.
> > Hopefully, someone can help. I'll summarize my situation.
> >
> > 1. Installed the final version of Vista Ultimate 32bit on a new harddrive
> > on my system. (nothing like a clean install). I still have my old HD in
> > there as a slave and by changing the boot drive in my BIOS I can easily
> > revert back to my XP just in case I had problems with vista.
> >
> > 2. My motherboard is an ASUS A7V8X-X with an Athlon 2600+ processor. The
> > motherboard has a built-in Realtek sound card.
> >
> > 3. Initially I had sound, but at some point it stopped. Unfortunately, I
> > didn't notice it until I had no way of knowing what stopped it. So I tried
> > installing the latest Realtek drivers and nothing would work so I decided to
> > go out an buy a new sound blaster card that had vista drivers. Since I'm not
> > heavily into "sound", I just purchase an inexpensive Audigy SE card.
> >
> > 4. I uninstalled the Realtek driver from the devicemanager rebooted and
> > changed my BIOS to disable the on board sound card.
> >
> > 5. When vista booted I ran the install for the vista beta drivers for the
> > Audigy SE. Still no sound.
> >
> > 6. Rebooted. Still no sound.
> >
> > 7. Changed the sound card to various PCI slots, rebooted, etc. Still no
> > sound.
> >
> > 8. Just to make sure, I booted to my Windows XP drive and installed the
> > drivers and the sound works well. A little skippy I must admit, but it works
> > none the less.
> >
> > 9. Another symptom is that my little speaker icon in the task tray has a
> > red x on it and if you select to open it, it says, "No audio device is
> > installed".
> >
> > 10. If you look at the card in the device manager it seems ok.
> >
> > 11. If you go to sounds in the control panel, the recording tab hangs the
> > control applet.
> >
> > Does anyone have a clue what it going on or how I can figure what to do to
> > fix this. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
> >
> > Could it be some sort of registry corruption? Any ideas where I can look?
> > I'm an advance user so I'm not afraid to go looking in places behind the
> > scenes. I can't help but think that it's not necessarily a problem with the
> > sound driver, but maybe the installed codecs or something.
> >
> > Thanks
> > Mark
>
> I was having the same problem with my Sound Blaster card. From what I could
> find, Vista seems to load minimum or no drivers if it doesn't find the sound
> blaster drivers. Creative Labs hasn't made new Vista-specific drivers for a
> lot of their cards yet. I solved the problem by running the drivers disk
> that came with the sound card when the Found New Hardware appeard and Vista
> asked for drivers for Multimedia Audio Controller. The entry I now have in
> my device manager for sound, video and game controllers is Creative EMU10K1
> Audio Processor (WMD) and sound appears to work fine so far. The game
> controller doesn't appear to be supported, which might make using a joystick
> a problem.
>
> As a side note, trying to install the drivers from the disk while in the
> Windows Vista environment didn't work. I kept getting the "no hardware
> found" message. To solve this I (1) uninsatalled all in the sound, video and
> game controllers, (2) shut down the computer, (3) removed the sound card and
> moved it to a different PCI slot, (4) turned the computer back on and (5)
> popped in the disk when Vista informed me "found new hardware" and asked for
> the manufacturer's disk for the drivers for Multimedia Audio Controller.
>
> I hope this helps.